Organ Donation in the Age of Social Networking

The Takeaway

Facebook has experimented with a lot of new and questionable plans over the years, from their controversial default privacy settings to their timeline layout, which some users love, and others hate.  But it seems no plan is as unusual as their new one, launched yesterday.
In short, the plan encourages everyone on Facebook to advertise their donor status on their pages, along with their birth dates and schools. Their goal: to encourage more people to become registered organ donors through the power of peer pressure.
Could the plan be the best thing to happen to organ donation? Or a slippery slope linking medical information and social media?  Jeff Jarvis is professor of journalism at City University of New York and author of the book “Public Parts.”  Art Caplan  is a professor of bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania.  

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